"I've been thinking," Scudi said. "If no word has reached them, your family will be sick with worry about you. And your friend, Twisp. Call Vashon. We'll make do. Maybe my suspicions are foolish."
He saw her throat pulse with a swallow and he remembered her tears over the heaped bodies of the Islanders.
"No," he said, "we should go to your Launch Base."
Again, Brett concentrated on the sea ahead of them. The two suns lifted heat-shimmers off the water. When he had been much younger, seeing the Island rim for the first time, the heat shimmers had created images for him. Long-whiskered sea dragons coiled above the ocean surface, giant muree and fat scrubberfish. The shimmer play now was nothing but heat reflected off water. He felt the warmth on his face and arms. He thought of Twisp leaning back against the coracle's tiller, eyes closed, soaking up the heat through his hairy chest.
"Where is this base?" he asked.
She reached up and turned a small dial below the overhead screen. Beside the dial, an alphanumerical keyboard glowed with its own internal lights. She typed HF-i, then LB-1. The screen flashed 141.2, then overprinted a spray of lines with a common focal point. A bright green spot danced at the wide outer arc of the lines. Scudi pointed at the spot.
"That's us." She pointed to the base of the spray. "We go here on course one forty-one point two." She pointed to a dial with a red arrow on the console in front of them. The arrow indicated 141.2.
"That's all there is to it?"
"All?" Scudi smiled. "There are hundreds of transmitter stations all around Pandora, a whole manufacturing and servicing complex - all to insure that we get from here to there."
Brett looked up at the screen. The spray of lines had pivoted until the bright green dot lay centered on course. The 141.2 still glowed in the lower left corner of the screen.
"If we require a course change, it will sound a klaxon and show the new numbers," she said. "Steeran homing on LB-one."
Brett looked out across the water beside them, seeing the spray kicked up by the foils, thinking how valuable such a system would be to Vashon's fishing fleet. The sun burned hot on him through the plaz, but the air felt good. Rich topside air blew in the vents. Scudi Wang was at his side and suddenly Pandora didn't seem to be the adversary that he'd always imagined. Even if it was a deadly place, it had its measure of beauty.
One measure of humanity lies in the lengths taken to right the wrongs perpetrated against others. Recognition of wrongdoing is the first crucial step.
- Raja Thomas, the Journals
Shadow Panille covered the dead Mute. He washed his hands in the alcohol basin beside the litter. The rest of the room bustled with the clink of steel instruments against trays. Low-voiced, one-word commands and grunts came from several busy groups of doctors and med-techs. Panille looked back over his shoulder at the long row of litters strung down the center of the room, each one surrounded by medics. Splashes and blotches of blood stained gray gowns and the eyes above the antiseptic masks looked more tired, more hopeless every hour. Of all the survivors brought in by the pickup teams, only two had escaped physical harm. Panille reminded himself that there were other kinds of harm. What the experience had done to their minds ... he hesitated to think of them as survivors.
The Mute behind Panille had died under the knife for lack of replacement blood. The medical facility had been unprepared for bleeders on such a tremendous scale. He heard Kareen Ale snap off her gloves behind him.
"Thanks for the assist," she said. "Too bad he didn't make it. This was a close one."
Panille watched one of the teams lift a litter and carry it toward the recovery area. At least a few would make it. And one of his men had said they were herding together the few fishing boats that had escaped and fled the drift. Panille rubbed his eyes and was immediately sorry. They burned from the touch of alcohol and started streaming tears.
Ale took him by the shoulder and led him to the sink beside the hatchway. It had a tall, curved spout that he could get his head under.
"Let the water run over the eyes," she said. "Blinking helps the rinse."
"Thanks."
She handed him a towel. "Relax," she said, "that's the last of them."
"How long have we been at it?"
"Twenty-six hours."
"How many made it?"
"Not counting those in shock, we have ninety still breathing in recovery. Several hundred with only minor injuries. I don't know. Fewer than a thousand, anyway, and six still under the knife here. Do you believe what this one told us?"
"About the sub? It's hard to write it off to hallucinations or delirium, considering the circumstances."
"He was clear-headed when they brought him in. Did you see what he managed to do with his legs? It's too bad he didn't make it; he tried harder than most people."
"Both legs severed below the knees and he managed to stop the bleeding himself," Panille said. "I don't know, Kareen. I guess I don't want to believe him. But I do."
"What about the part about the sub rolling upside-down before its dive?" Ale asked. "Couldn't that mean somebody just lost control of the machine? Surely no Merman would do something like that deliberately."
"That patient" - Panille waved towards the litter behind them - "claimed that a Merman sub deliberately sank their Island. He said he saw the whole thing, the sub came directly up through their center and -"
"It was an Islander sub," she insisted. "Must've been."
"But he said ..."
Kareen inhaled deeply and sighed. "He was mistaken, my dear," she said. "And to avoid serious trouble, we'll have to prove it."
They both stepped aside as two attendants carried the litter with the dead Mute out the hatchway, bound for the mortuary. Kareen began to recite what Panille knew would become the Merman line: "He was a Mute. Mutes don't have all of their faculties, even under the best of circumstances."
"You've been spending too much time with Gallow," Panille said.
"But look at what we had to work with here," she said. Her voice bordered on a whisper. Panille didn't like it, nor did he like the turn of conversation. Frustration and fatigue brought out a side of Kareen Ale that he had not known existed. "Missing parts, extra parts, misplaced parts." She gestured with a whimsical wave of her hand. "What their medical people do for an anatomy class boggles the mind. No, Shadow, it must have been an Islander sub. Some interior score they were settling. What could any of us gain by such an act? Nothing. I say we should have a drink. Just have a drink and forget it. How about it?"
"What he described was not an Islander sub," Panille insisted. "What he described was a kelp sub, with cutters and welders."
Kareen pulled him aside, as a mother might take a troublesome child aside during WorShip. "Shadow! You're not making sense. If Mermen sank that Island, then why go to all the trouble to man the pickup teams? Why not just let them go? No, we worked hard here to save what we could. Not that it mattered."
"What do you mean, 'Not that it mattered'?"
"You saw them, their condition. The best of them were starving. Leather on bone. They looked like furniture."
"Then we should feed them," Panille said. "Ryan Wang didn't develop the largest food distribution in history just to let people starve."
"Feeding them's a lot easier than hauling them in dead," she said.
"These are people!" Panille snapped.
Ale's quick eyes flicked from Panille, around the room to the surgical and trauma teams, then back. Her lips were trembling, and he saw with surprise that she was only barely under control.
"That patient may have been a Mute, but he was no fool," Panille insisted. "He reported what he observed, and he did it clearly."
"I don't want to believe him," Ale said.
"But you do." Panille put an arm around her shoulders.
Ale trembled at his touch. "We must talk," she said. "Would you go back to my quarters with me?"
They rode the tubes, Ale's head lolling on his shoulder. She snored a little, caught herself and settled closer against him. He liked the feeling of her warmth soaking into him. When their car started into a curve he held her shoulder a little tighter to keep the movement from waking her, giving himself time to think. Kareen wanted to talk. Did she want to persuade? How would she argue? With her body?
Panille decided this thought was unworthy of him. He rejected it.
Twenty-six hours in surgery, he thought. Soon Ale would face the difficult politics that the surgery represented. He had noticed the deepening circles of sleepless nights settling under Ale's beautiful eyes. Panille was glad for one aspect of the surgery - it brought out the doctor in Ale, a part of her personality that had become more ghostlike during her brief association with Ryan Wang. Though she'd been alert and awake during the whole frustrating business with the Guemes Islanders, Ale had fallen asleep almost before the transport hatch closed on them. As the Islanders died under the knife one by one, he had watched her blue eyes darken over her mask.
"They're so frail," she had said. "So poor!"
The replacement blood had run out in two hours. Plasma and oxygen were gone in sixteen. Surgical supervisors suggested sterilizing sea water and using that for plasma, but Ale refused.
"Stick with what we know," she said. "This is not the time for experimentation."
In her sleep, Ale's hand reached around Panille's waist and pulled him closer. Her hair smelled of antiseptics and perspiration, but he found the mixture comforting because it was her. He liked the brush of her hair against his bare neck. The hours of sweat in his own hair made him glad he'd kept it braided. He ached for a shower even more than he ached for a bed. Panille caught himself dozing off just as they jerked to a stop. The panel above their heads flashed the message: Organization and Distribution.
"Kareen," he said, "we're here."
She sighed and squeezed his waist tighter. He pressed the hold button on the panel with his free hand.
"Kareen?"
Another sigh. "I heard you, Shadow. I'm so tired."
"We've arrived," he said. "You'll be more comfortable inside."
She looked up at him but didn't move away. Her eyes were red and puffy from lack of sleep but she managed a smile. "I just got acquainted with you," she said. "I thought I knew you, but now I'm not letting you out of my sight."
He placed a finger against her lips. "I'll just take you to your quarters. We can talk later."
"What makes this mysterious Shadow Panille tick?" she asked in a whisper. Then she kissed him. It was a brief kiss, but warm and powerful. "You don't mind, do you?" she asked.
"What about Gallow?"
"Well," she said, "the sooner we get out of here the sooner life goes on."
They uncurled themselves from each other. He liked the way the warm spots lingered and tingled on his skin. Ale stepped out of the hatch onto the docking bay and reached back a slender hand to pull him through.
"You're beautiful," he said, and her strong grip pulled him right up to her, then she hugged him close. Again, he put down his doubts about her.
"You have a way with words," she said.
"Runs in my family."
"You could've been a surgeon," she said. "You have good hands. I'd like to spend more time studying your hands."
"I'd like that," he murmured against her hair. "I've always wanted to know you better. You know that."
"I have to warn you, I snore."
"I noticed," he said. They held each other and swayed on the docking bay. "You drool, too," he said.
"Don't be crude." She pinched him in the ribs. "Ladies don't drool."
"What's this wet spot on my shoulder?"
"How embarrassing," she said. Then she took his hand and guided him up the walkway toward her building. She glanced back at him and said, "Nobody lives long enough for dillydallying. Let's get to it."
Panille realized right then that the pace of his life had just turned itself up a full notch. Tired as he had been, he sparked with the measure of energy that she injected into the air around them. There was a new bounce to her step that he hadn't noticed in surgery. Her body moved smoothly, quickly across the black-tiled foyer and he matched her step-for-step. When they walked into the ambassadorial quarters they were still holding hands.
Pattern is his who can see beyond shape: Life is his who can tell beyond words.
- Lao Tzu, Shiprecords
Both suns stood high in the dark sky, raising heat shimmers off the water. Brett's sensitive eyes, shielded by dark glasses Scudi had found in the foil's lockers, scanned the sea. The foil cut through the waves with an ease that thrilled him. He marveled at how quickly his senses had adapted to speed. A feeling of freedom, of escape soothed him. Pursuit could not move this fast. Danger could only lie ahead, where heat shimmers distorted the horizon. Or, as Twisp called it, "the Future."
When Brett had been quite young, standing with his mother at Vashon's edge for the first time, the heat-dazzled air had been inhabited by coils of long-whiskered dragons. Today's sun felt new on his arms and face, glistening through the canopy onto the instruments. The suns ignited golden glints in Scudi's black hair. There were no dragons.
Scudi bent intently over the controls, watching the sea, the dials, the guidance screen above her head. Her mouth was set in a grim line, which softened only when she looked at Brett.
A wide stretch of kelp drew a dark shadow on the water off to his right. Scudi steered them into the lee of the kelp, finding smoother water there. Brett stared out at an ovoid green mat within the kelp. At the very center of the oval, this particular green was a vivid reflector of the sunlight. The green darkened away from the center until the kelp patch became yellowed and brown at the edges.
Seeing where he was looking, Scudi said, "The outer edges die off, curl under and fortify the rest of the patch."
They rode without speaking for a time.
Abruptly, Scudi shocked him by shutting down the foil's engines. The big craft dropped off the step with a rocking lurch.
Brett looked wildly at Scudi, but she appeared calm.
"You start us," Scudi said.
"What?"
"Start us up." Her voice was calmly insistent. "What if I were injured?"
Brett sank into his seat and looked down at the control panel. Below the screen near the center of the cockpit lay four switches and a sticker labeled "Starting Procedure."
He read the instructions and depressed the switch marked "Ignition." The hot hiss of the hydrogen ram came from the rear of the foil.
Scudi smiled.
As the instructions told him, Brett glanced up at the guidance screen. A miniature line-drawing of a foil appeared around a green dot on the screen. A red line speared outward from the green dot. He touched the button marked forward and pushed the throttle gently ahead, gripping the wheel tightly with his free hand. He could feel sweat under his palms. The craft began to lift, tipping on the flank of a wave.
"Right down the trough," Scudi reminded him.
He turned the wheel slightly and pushed the throttle farther ahead. The foil came out of the water with a gentle gliding motion and he gave it more throttle. They came up on the step and he saw the speed-distance counter flicker, then settle on "72." The green dot tracked on the red line.
"Very good," Scudi said. "I'll take it now. Just remember to follow the instructions."
Scudi increased speed. Cabin air felt cooler as vents exchanged topside air from a clear and sunny day.
Brett scanned as much of the horizon as he could see from the cabin, a thing he had learned from Twisp, almost unconsciously. It was his landscape, the view he had known since infancy - open ocean with long rollers broken here and there by patches of kelp, silvery current intersections and wind-foamed crests. There was a rhythm to it that satisfied him. All the divergent variety became one thing inside him, as everything was one in the sea. The suns came up separately but met before they sank below the horizon. Waves crossed each other and told him of things beyond his view. It was all one. He tried to say something of this to Scudi.
"The suns do that because of their ellipses," she said. "I know about the waves. Everything that touches them tells us something of itself."
"Ellipses?" he asked.
"My mother said the suns met at midday when she was young."
Brett found this interesting but he felt that Scudi had missed his point. Or she didn't want to discuss it. "You must've learned a lot from your mother."
"She was very smart except for men," Scudi said. "At least, that's what she used to say."
"When she was mad at your father?"
"Yes. Or different men at the outposts."
"What are these outposts?"
"Places where we are few, where we work hard and have our different ways. When I come into the city, or even the launch site, I'm aware that I am different. I speak different. I have been warned about it."
"Warned?" Brett felt undertones of some dark savagery among the Mermen.
"My mother said if I took outpost-talk into the city I couldn't blend. People would look at me as an outsider - a dangerous perspective."
"Dangerous?" he asked. "To see things differently?"
"Sometimes." Scudi glanced at him. "You must blend in. You could pass, but I know you for an Islander by the sound of your talk."
Scudi was trying to warn him, he thought.
Or teach me.
He noted that her accent was different out here than it had been back in her quarters. It wasn't her choice of words so much as the way she said them. There was a sparseness about her now. She was even more direct.
Brett looked out at the ocean speeding past. He thought about this Merman unity, this Merman society that measured danger in an accent. Like the waves, which met at odd angles, currents in Merman society were refracting off each other. "Interference," the physicists called it; he knew that much.
The ease with which Scudi kept the big foil skipping the wavetops told Brett something of her past. She had only to glance at the guidance screen and out at the ocean to become one with all of it. She avoided the thick stretches of wild kelp and kept them securely on course toward this mysterious Launch Base.
"There's more wild kelp lately," he said. "No Mermen attending it."
"Pandora belonged to the kelp once," she said. "Now kelp grows and spreads at the top of an exponential curve. Do you know what that means?"
"The more kelp there is the faster it spreads and the faster it grows," he said.
"It is more like an explosion at this point," she said, "or like the moment of crystallization in a saturated solution. Add one tiny crystal and the whole thing precipitates out one massive crystal. That's what the kelp will do next. Right now it is learning to care for itself."
Brett shook his head. "I know what the history says. Still ... sentient plants?"
She shrugged off his incredulity like a shawl. "If the C/P is right - if they've all been right - Vata is the key to the kelp. She is the crystal that will precipitate its consciousness. Or its soul."
"Vata," he whispered, a childlike awe in his voice. He was not one for WorShip, but he respected any human being who had outlived so many generations. No Merman had ever done that. Did Scudi believe in that Chaplain/Psychiatrist stuff?
He asked her.
Scudi shrugged. "I only know what I can arrange in my mind. I have seen the kelp learn. It is sentient, but very low-grade. There is no magic in sentiency except life and time. Vata has kelp genes, that is a fact."
"Twisp says last time it took the kelp a quarter of a billion years to come awake. How will we ever know ..."
"We've helped. The rest is up to it."
"What does Vata have to do with it?"
"I don't really know. I suspect she's some kind of catalyst. The last natural link with the kelp's ancestor. Shadow says Vata's really in a coma. She went into the coma when the kelp died. Shock, maybe."
"What about Duque? Or any number of us - Mermen included - who have kelp genes? Why aren't we the catalysts you talk about?"
"No one human has all kelp genes - such a being would be kelp, not human," she said. "Each one may have wholly different combinations."
"Duque says Vata dreams him."
"Some of our more religious types say Vata dreams us all," Scudi said. She sniffed. "The fact that you and I were prisoners and escaped, that was no dream." She shot him a warm glance. "We are a good team."
Brett blushed and nodded.
"How close are we to Launch Base?" he asked.
"Before nightfall," she said.
Brett thought about the coming encounter. Launch Base would be an important place, many people. Among those people might be the ones who had deliberately destroyed Guemes. His Islander accent could mean danger. He turned to Scudi and tried to speak of this casually. He didn't want to argue with her or scare her. But it became immediately apparent that Scudi had been thinking along the same lines.
"In the red locker beside the main hatch," she said. "Dive suits and kitpacks. We'll be in colder water at the Launch Base."
"Hypothermia kills," he said. He had seen the two words in bright yellow on the red locker, reminding him of his earliest survival lessons. Island children were taught the dangers of the cold water as soon as they could talk. Apparently Mermen taught the same lesson, although Twisp claimed that Mermen had greater tolerance for cold.
"See if you can find suits to fit us," she said. "If we have to go over the side ..." She left the sentence unfinished, knowing it was unnecessary to continue.
The sight of the pile of gray dive suits inside the locker brought a smile to Brett's face. The organic suits, of Islander design and manufacture, represented one of the few advancements they held over the Mermen. He selected a "small" and a "medium" and tore open the packages to activate them. He picked up two of the orange kitpacks with the suits and stowed them under the command couch seats in the cabin.
"What are those kitpacks for?" he asked.
"They're survival kits," she said. "Inflatable raft, knife, lines, pain pills. There are even repellent grenades for dashers."
"Have you ever had to use grenades?"
"No. But my mother did once. One of her team did not get away."
Brett shuddered. Dashers seldom came near Islands anymore, but fishermen had been lost and there were stories of children taken by sneak attacks at an Island's rim. Suddenly, the wide ocean around their speeding foil lost some of its warm softness, its protective familiarity. Brett shook his head to clear it. He and Twisp had lived out here on a tiny coracle. For the love of Ship! A foil could not be as vulnerable as a flimsy coracle. But they had no squawks on the foil and if they had to take to the water in dive suits ... Could their own senses warn them in time? Dashers were blindingly fast.
The two suns had moved perceptibly closer to each other, nearing their sunset meeting. Brett stared ahead, looking for the first sign of their goal. He knew this fear of dashers was foolishness, something they'd laugh about someday ...
Something bobbing on the water ahead commanded his whole attention.
"What's that?" he asked, pointing at a spot far ahead and slightly to starboard.
"I think it's a boat," Scudi said.
"No," he mused, "whatever it is, it's two things."
"Two boats?"
The foil's speed was bringing the objects closer at an astonishing rate. His voice was barely audible: "Two coracles."
"One is towing the other," Scudi said. She veered the foil toward them.
Brett stood and leaned against the control console, squinting out at the coracles. He waved a hand at Scudi, palm down: "Slow down!" She throttled back and he gripped the console to keep his balance as the hull dropped into the water with a surge of the bow wave.
"It's Queets!" Brett shouted, pointing at the man at the tiller. "Ship's teeth, it's Queets!"
Scudi shut down one ram and maneuvered the foil upwind of the coracles. Brett fumbled at the dogs to the canopy and swung it back, leaning out to shout at the boats only fifty meters downwind. "Twisp! Queets!"
Twisp stood and shielded his eyes with a hand, the long arm held awkwardly against his side.
"Kid!"
Brett tossed him a traditional greeting of fishermen at sea: "Do you have a full load?"
